This week, Ciarán Lenehan details the financial performance of farmers participating in the third phase of our Teagasc/Irish Farmers Journal BETTER farm programme.

While the financial review is based on just one year’s data and many of the farms are at an early stage of the development process, we are already seeing the well-established trends from the previous two phases continuing.

The 16-month bull beef system is once again outperforming all other systems, delivering a net margin of €730 per hectare above suckler-to-weanling systems. The financial pressure on the weanling system is evident, returning a negative net margin of €220/ha before the inclusion of the basic payment.

The data clearly dispels any logic to the argument that the reason winter finishers are struggling to make a margin is because weanlings are overpriced.

Meanwhile, once again we see the need for processors to return a significant premium for steer beef over young bull beef if castrating is to be a financially viable option. It also questions the value in comparing the Irish steer beef price with the EU bull beef price when there are clearly significant efficiency gains delivered at farm from the bull systems.

In this context, the only real barometer against which we can accurately benchmark the performance of Irish processors is the UK steer price.

At farm level, the impact of land type on financial performance cannot be ignored.

Once again, we see the heavier farms struggling to achieve the stocking rates necessary to drive output, despite a high level of management. It is positive to see the programme management team starting to look at the return on labour achieved on the participant farms.

While at an early stage, it will be interesting to see what can be achieved as more data becomes available. In many ways, return per hour on a part-time suckler farm could be a better benchmark than return per hectare.